Friday, February 22, 2008

How Does A Tools Nerd Pack?

Packing is so 2000. You have stuff. There are tools to help you move that stuff, and you're likely to find that the right set of tools will enable to you to completely forego packing, bringing higher productivity and lower maintenance costs to your move.

First, your tiny little trinkets you've collected over the years. I'm talking stuff like those Dot Net Rocks! mugs you picked up at various spots, or the nearly useless USB-crappy-writing-pen combo kits, or the stupid pokey things you use to hang stuff on the wall of your Dilbert cubicle. Think consolidation. Think compression. There must be eight or ten tools which let you smash all those little trinkets together. Find the first three from Google or download.com and install them. All three, and maybe a fourth written by some guy in Uzbekistan just because his name sounds cool and the widget integrates into Explorer shell's context menu and it's the cat's ass when your Explorer context menu is 57 lines long.

Next, let's move on to memorabilia. I'm talking those AttaBoy! certificates, test certification certificates, "Praise Him Because He Saved Us From Certain Death at the Hands of Pygmy Frogmen Headhunting Managers" certificates, etc. Think filing utilities. SourceForge and Tigris must have at least three each. Pick the first hit from SourceForge, the second from Tigris, and generate a random prime number higher than 1,252,183 to select where you get your third. Deinstall that last one because you find it doesn't play nicely with 64-bit Vista. Now that you're thinking about it, go back and remove that Uzbekistani archiving utility because you're noticing Explorer seems to be crashing with alarming regularity.

After that, look to your geek gear. Your computer, your monitors, your mouse (because you work for a cool company that actually buys you a mouse instead of making you buy your own), and possibly your external hard drive. While any sap can grab bubblewrap, I'd say there's got to be at least 3.2 suppliers of Sorbothane geek device cushioning packs. Look 'em up and get quotes from the 3.0. Drop the second quote, because it's your friend from Uzbekistan who has given up on writing Explorer shell add-ins and is looking to expand into a new line of tools. Manufacturing tools.

Finally, the righteously important stuff: your furniture. My once skinny butt sits in an Aeron chair which I paid my own $$ for. You may envy me. Maybe not, because you've likely got more cash in your pocket after not springing for an Aeron. Regardless, you need to transport that baby to the new office, but you first must ensure your transport layer's working properly. Go download a packet sniffer. Find some stub drivers that you'll need to ensure your NIC is properly smacked into promiscuous mode for working with that sniffer.

Now you realize that maybe that wasn't such a good idea because your system is completely locked up, the activity light on your system's solid red instead of the occasionally orange blinking state, and the usually incredibly pleasant network lady is running up and down the hall yelling "Hey, which of you jackasses is fooling around with a packet sniffer and a promiscuous mode driver?" You're also realizing that that Uzbekistani guy left the Sorbothane gig (Something about missing supply locker supplies. That and the missing donut fund money, plus there was the whole thing about the Russian Mafia hanging out in the parking lot, too, but that was overblown) and has had his nefarious fingers on the keyboard that was involved in that promiscuous mode driver.

At this point your system, overloaded with cool tools, has become about as productive and unstable as a blogger writing a post at 12:30am when he's due to get his kids out of bed for the school bus in 5.5 hours. The only recourse is to repave and install fresh from new media.

You can start that right after you finish packing for the move.

(Did I mention that Uzbekistan guy used to work in the plant where your Vista DVDs were burned?)

About Me

I'm the owner/principal of Guidepost Systems. I help lots of great folks figure out what works and what doesn't in the world of delivering quality software -- something I'm very passionate about. I'm also a Father trying to remain sane while trying to build great software, herd my kids around, fix school lunches and handle the yardwork. (And roast great coffee!)